Technology Lab —

Mozilla: 2 billion Firefox add-ons downloaded

Mozilla announced today that Firefox users have downloaded over 2 billion …

Mozilla announced today that Firefox users have downloaded more than two billion browser add-ons. To mark the occasion, Mozilla has created a special list of the top 25 add-ons.

Although Firefox is falling behind the alternatives in some key areas like performance, the open source browser still delivers peerless flexibility with a rich add-on system and unrivaled support for extensibility. Mozilla's curated extension archive has over 60,000 add-ons that have been contributed by third-party developers.

The organization's statistics show that users have downloaded two billion add-ons and there are 150 million in active daily use. Some numbers published last year show that well over a third of all Firefox users have add-ons installed.

"When we reached 1 billion Firefox Add-on downloads in November 2008, we thought it would take us less than 3 years to get to the next billion, and with your help, we've gotten to 2 billion in half that time," Mozilla's add-on team wrote in a blog entry on the Rock Your Firefox blog. "With more than 150 million add-ons in use every day, we know that the next billion add-on downloads will be here before we know it."

Mozilla has run a series of promotional campaigns to encourage awareness of Firefox's add-on system and has added several new features to its add-on site over the past year, including a feature that allows users to donate money to the authors of their favorite add-ons.